The basic idea is to give office workers more space to get together in a relaxed setting to discuss their project or hash out ideas.

The added benefit of Steelcase Inc.'s new office system: A company can create those collaborative spaces within its facility without adding square footage.

Call it cost consciousness meets office trends, as today's work styles increasingly require more collaboration and corporations work harder to maximize the use of their office footprint.

"If you're going to have a certain square footage, you're going to have to make it as efficient and effective as possible," said Diane Ishmael, marketing director for architecture, furniture and technology at Grand Rapids-based Steelcase.

Photo by Mark Sanchez"You can save a lot more money through square footage than you can in furnishings any day," says Steelcase's Diane Ishmael, with John Hamilton.

That need is one of the drivers behind a major product introduction this year from Steelcase, as well as a new technology-based service from Herman Miller Inc. that aims to help corporations optimize office space.

Both companies -- which debut their new offerings next week at the annual industry trade show NeoCon in Chicago -- say they're seeing increased client demands to contain rising real estate costs.

"A lot of our clients struggle with this all the time -- 'is my space working?' Without measuring it, you're blindly planning their spaces," said Todd Thompson, advanced development manager at Herman Miller, which is launching its Space Utilization Service at NeoCon.

"It's a huge cost that we've never really had a lot of information on," Thompson said.

At Steelcase, designers and managers behind the new "c:scape" and "media:scape" portfolio of products are betting on corporations' willingness to invest in an office system that can generate a return by alleviating the need to expand office space when hiring additional staff or creating needed common areas within the office.

"You can save a lot more money through square footage than you can in furnishings any day," Ishmael said.

Sporting a bright, airy aesthetic, c:scape does away with the traditional modular office walls and instead uses a European-style benching system to distribute power and data to individual workstations. Ports to plug into utilities are installed in a small storage compartment beneath a desk surface that slides back and forth to allow easy access.

A key element of c:scape is the smaller footprint it requires, though users aren't supposed to notice. The design, layout and the aesthetic of the system create a much more open environment, allowing air and light to flow more readily through the office and giving the impression of a larger workstation.

"It makes you feel psychologically like you have more space," John Hamilton,
Steelcase's manager of industrial design, said as he offered a recent preview of the system.

"It's not what you used to have, but it's going to feel more generous. It's going to feel bigger," Hamilton said. "As you open up these vistas (in the office), people are going to think they have more space."

The same concept went into the design of Herman Miller's My Studio office system that debuted at NeoCon two years ago.

Where a typical workstation has traditionally used an 8-feet-by-8-feet configuration, Steelcase now is designing them for many clients at 7-feet-by-7 feet. Some clients that operate call centers are even now asking for work stations as small as five-feet-by-five-feet to save on real estate costs, Hamilton said.

By compressing the footprint of individual workstations, companies can create room for common areas -- or vignettes, as some in the industry call them -- where teams of workers can gather to collaborate.

One of Steelcase's new products, media:scape, allows three to six workers to plug in laptops for a meeting at a counter. Workers can display the presentation or work on their own computer screen onto a large flat-screen monitor mounted off to the side and quickly switch back and forth between each other with the simple tap of a "puck," named because of its resemblance to a hockey puck.

The common areas created can enable a company to cut down on the number of conference rooms built into an office, Hamilton said. The new product lineup stems from research Steelcase conducted with commercial real estate executives and facility managers, he said.

"Instead of conference rooms of the past, they can have a really hard-working space that allows (workers) to bring the tools that they work with and connect and work together," Hamilton said.

At Herman Miller, the goal of the new Space Utilization Service is better planning for office layout by more accurately determining exactly how much space a company requires.

The service uses an electronic sensor temporarily embedded in the office chair of each work-station and seating in common areas. Over a predetermined period -- three weeks, for instance -- the system measures, through readings every 10 minutes, how often and how much individual workstations and common areas are used.

The data then is sent to Herman Miller for analysis to determine a corporate client's office occupancy.

When the system was beta-tested at tech giant Hewlett Packard Co., a Herman Miller client, it found the company had an average daily office occupancy rate of 37 percent.
Through traditional visual "bed checks" of the office, Hewlett Packard had previously perceived 73 percent office occupancy in the facility where the system was tested.

"Obviously, a lot of space was being unused," Thompson said.

By having a much more accurate measure, corporations can better plan and optimize their office space, he said.

"It's fine tuning the real estate use to the task at hand," Thompson said. "Our clients have never had a very accurate way of measuring the occupancy of their facilities.
How do you know you're using your real estate efficiently?"

Thompson sees the service as particularly useful in corporate sales offices where personnel spend a good part of their time on the road, allowing people to share workstations, rather than have individual stations that spend a majority of the time unoccupied.

Or perhaps, a corporation will find out it doesn't need as many conference rooms or needs more but smaller conference rooms.

The cost of the service isn't cheap -- "tens of thousands of dollars," Herman Miller Director of External Communications Mark Schurman said. The actual cost could vary widely based on the length of a survey, the number of spaces monitored and the depth of the analysis and scale of the project, Schurman said.

But Herman Miller believes that cost is easily offset as a corporation optimizes, or perhaps even reduces, its office footprint.

"It takes away the guessing. We can measure and find out the maximum capacity that space has and supply the appropriate number" of workstations needed, Thompson said.